First post, would like to say Great Site!

Ok was using PQ's fantastic Pocket DVD Studio until I bought Vista and it just will not work anymore.

My handheld has a qvga 320*240 screen.

Have read the guides and tried some other software, Auto Gordian and Fairuse both seem ok. Great guides, thanks for taking the time to support others.

However I was spoiled by PQ as despite having to pay, it allowed me to simply select the conversion rate (I always set it to around 700 kbs) and this gave me great quality. I'm a film buff, quality matters. My SD is 4GB so space is not an object apart from the fact I like to store 4-5 films atime on it.

Have used the free part of most pay software but they are poor in comparison to PQ.

Please recommend software, but one that allows me to select the quality not the size as Auto or Fair do. I really prefer the conversion where I could select the kbs and it told me the size of the output. Can't seem to find anything that allows this.

If possible would also like to boost sound a little and increase brightness a touch.

Tall order but I'm sure you people can help.

Thanks in advance,
David

mediacoder is an awesome program. it can probably do what you want and it will probably work on vista.

check it out: http://mediacoder.sourceforge.net/

May I kindly recommend DVDCatalyst. The author gives great support. It is a pay program in two versions. The full version offers many settings options and a lighter GT version designed for fast setups. This program is also very fast. Also the author just updated the app for Vista. Even before the update I got it to run on my vista machine by setting admin priviledges for the app. Hope the info helps

Alan

Of all the "one-click" solutions, Auto Gordion Knot is simply the best. Unlike the others, AutoGK does not do the work directly. It is just a front end for some of the tools that the prosumers use, i.e. VDubMod, DGIndex, Avisynth scripts and plugins, etc that do the heavy lifting in the background. The other tools you mention just won't give you the same quality at a specific size/resolution.

You can set your encode for a specific quality level OR a specific size. I have found that near DVD quality can be obtained using a fixed width of 720 (keeps the same resolution as on a DVD) with the quality level at 75 using Xvid. For a 2 hour movie, this results in about 1.4 GB. If the movie is complex, then more, and if simple and slow, then less.

If you want to encode for your device, I would use a fixed width of either 640 or 320 (probably 640) and start with a quality around 70. A good rule of thumb for a QVGA device for the average movie is (length of movie x 3 = target MB size) and for a VGA device (length x (5 to 6) = target MB size). Use those guidelines for a slow movie to determine a good qualtiy number to shoot for. Then, when you encode a faster movie at the same quality number, you will get similar quality, but at the cost of a larger file.

HTH